Remembering Nubia’s Past: Space, Generations and Memorial Practices

To Identify with a Memory : On Nubian Post-displacement Ethnic Identity (Re)Construction in Contemporary Egypt

“…Throughout the first half of the last century Nubians endured various waves of migration and displacements, followed by a final and infinite forced displacement as a result of the complete submersion of their homeland behind Aswan's High Dam in 1964. Ever since then, Nubians lived dispersed in different Egyptian regions and cities in addition to the state-built displacement villages (Agha 2019;Madbouly 2021;Scudder 2016).…”

“…A great attention was given to Nubians at the time of the displacement; however, it was mostly ethnographic and keen on documenting the life of a community being displaced and a place about to vanish permanently (Fernea, 1963;Fernea and Kennedy, 1966;Fahim, 1973). Decades after, triggered by years of political turbulence since 2011, and the rise of questions of human rights, advocacy and minority rights in particular, the interest in the Nubian issues was revived by another strand of academic literature (Janmyr, 2017;Madbouly, 2021). Moreover, looking at Nubians in a context of diaspora seemed to have caught the attention of scholars interested in Nubian literature and nostalgia (Abbas, 2014;Agha, 2019), with a recent current of comparative studies that compares Nubians to other diasporic and indigenous populations (Haqqi, 2020;Maatouq, 2022).…”